Following the two successful wars against the Turks waged by Catherine II (1768–1774, 1787–1792) and the annexation of the Crimean Khanate (1783), Russia gradually expanded across a broad front, stretching from the Dniester to the Kuban, as far as the Black Sea. The newly acquired territories of ‘New Russia’ (Russian: Novorossiya) were organised in 1802 into the governorates (Russian: gubernija) of Kherson, Tauria/Tavria and Yekaterinoslav/Ekaterinoslav. The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR), established in 1919, replaced the governorates with smaller regions (oblasts), which were named after their respective administrative centres. The Crimean Peninsula, however, was incorporated as the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Russian: Krymskaya ASSR) of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (RSFSR) and was not incorporated into the USSR until 1954. In summary, the regions within the territory of the former New Russia are referred to as ‘Southern Ukraine’ (Ukrainian: Pivdnja Ukraїni) or also as the northern region, or simply as the “Black Sea region” (Ukrainian: Pivnične Pryčornomor’e), literally translated as “by the Black Sea”.

The almost treeless lowlands of southern Ukraine consist, in the north, of fertile black earth, which is particularly well suited to agriculture, and give way to loamy soils further south. However, extreme temperature fluctuations and a lack of rainfall can reduce crop yields. Major (the Dnieper) and minor rivers cross the region from north to south, flowing into the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The Donets Basin is a centre of heavy industry. The coastline along the Crimean Mountains (Ukrainian: Kryms’ki Gory), with its subtropical climate, is a popular holiday destination.

In New Russia, it was mainly Ukrainians and Russians who were settled there, but also foreigners, including German ‘colonists’. They are referred to as Black Sea Germans (Russian: pričernomorskie nemcy) in the narrower sense; in the broader sense, the Black Sea Germans also include the Germans of Bessarabia and the Don region. Depending on their nationality, they are also referred to as Ukrainian or Russian Germans. By the time of the first Russian census in 1897, the number of Germans in the three New Russian governorates had risen from 72,000 in 1844 to 283,000, or just under 5 per cent of the total population.^[1] The 1926 census recorded 330,000 Germans in southern Ukraine and the Crimea, formerly known as New Russia.^[2] The controversial 1939 census, which was intended to conceal population losses due to starvation and terror, put the figure at 364,000.^[3]

The Russian government enticed foreign settlers with a range of privileges: travel allowances, loans to set up home, a ‘land allotment’ of usually 60 desyatinas (1 desyatina = 1.1 hectares, hereafter D.), a ten-year tax exemption and exemption from conscription. The German immigrants who settled in the southern Russian steppe and the Crimea from 1786 onwards were united by neither a common origin nor a common religion. The first settlers left Danzig/Gdańsk and the Werder region during the reign of Catherine II (1762–1796). Most of them were Mennonites who founded a number of villages, so-called ‘colonies’ – the ‘region’ of Chortica – on the Dnieper, south of Yekaterinoslav/Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro). The large groups of Mennonite immigrants arriving between 1804 and 1806 during the reign of Alexander I (1801–1825), and the smaller groups in the following decades, were instead directed to the Taurida Governorate and established their villages east of the Molotschna River, which flows into the Sea of Azov.

The settlement areas of the German colonists and the ‘
’ Balkan settlers in New Russia and Bessarabia, for example,
1848. [D. Brandes: Adopted by the Tsars, © BKGE]

In the years 1803–04 and 1808–09, large groups of Lutherans, Reformed Protestants and Catholics from south-western and western Germany, Alsace and Switzerland accepted the Russian government’s invitation. Their villages were scattered across the western bank of the Molotschna, the hinterland of Odessa/Odesa, the lower Dnieper and the Crimea. Chiliastic hopes and economic hardship prompted a large number of people from Württemberg to set out for Mount Ararat in the Caucasus between 1816 and 1818. However, some of these immigrants accepted the government’s offer to remain in New Russia and Bessarabia. Lutheran and Catholic emigrants from West Prussia, Baden and Hesse were granted land north of Mariupol/Mariupol’ between 1823 and 1842. Ultimately, Lutherans accounted for about half, whilst Catholics and Mennonites each accounted for just under a quarter of the German settlers.^[4] With the large waves of immigration triggered by the recruitment campaigns of Catherine II and Alexander I, the newly founded city of Odessa also gained a core community of German craftsmen and merchants. By 1897, their numbers had risen to 10,248 as a result of migration from the surrounding colonies. They owned numerous factories and craft workshops; they met in their churches and clubs and, in some cases, sent their children to German schools.

Owing to their greater start-up capital and their superior agricultural knowledge, the Mennonites on the eastern bank of the Molotschna made faster progress than their fellow believers in Chortica and than the Lutherans and Catholics on the other side of the river, around half of whom had practised a trade in their former homeland and had spent their last savings on the journey to Russia. With their horses and the German tools and ladder carts they had brought with them – and which they soon began to make themselves – they were able to work more effectively than their neighbours. Economic progress was also driven by an agricultural association which required all Mennonites to practise a four-field crop rotation system with fallow land and which promoted sheep farming through the distribution of Merino sheep. By 1875, the Mennonites were devoting, on average, half of their land to arable farming. Earlier than any other farmers in New Russia, they used multi-furrow ploughs and, later, sowing, mowing and threshing machines.

The Lutheran and Catholic colonists took longer to acclimatise to life on the steppe. A lack of food and clean water, as well as living in poor housing, cost many colonists their health or even their lives in the early years. In the 1820s, swarms of locusts devoured the fields. In 1833, New Russia suffered a total crop failure, followed by another poor harvest. However, the good harvests of the following years helped the colonies to experience an economic upswing, particularly as Russian wheat had by then found a stable market in Western Europe. Nevertheless, harvest yields continued to fluctuate extremely widely even in the second half of the 19th century.

From the Crimean War (1853–1856) onwards, German colonists built steam-powered mills in their villages, in the capitals of the New Russian governorates and in the centres of the districts. In Yekaterinoslav (now Dnipro), more than half of the mills were owned by Mennonites. German village craftsmen capitalised on the increased demand for agricultural implements and carts, selling them from the 1850s onwards not only to their compatriots but also to people of other nationalities. When the government imposed high customs duties on the import of iron goods, domestic production of agricultural machinery increased. New Russia took the lead ahead of the western and Baltic provinces and increased its share of the production of agricultural implements and machinery in the Russian Empire to almost 50 per cent in 1911. The workshop of the former blacksmith Höhn in Odessa developed into the empire’s largest plough manufacturer, employing 1,200 workers. Further agricultural machinery factories were established in German colonies or nearby towns such as Alexandrowsk/Aleksandrovsk (now Zaporizhzhia) and Yekaterinoslav.

As the law prohibited the physical division of state-owned land, the number of colonists who had not inherited any land grew. In 1857, there were 7,007 families with land and 3,600 families without land in New Russia. Some of the landless coped by leasing a plot of land from their brothers who were entitled to an inheritance or from people in the surrounding area. Others practised a trade without relinquishing their status as colonists. In the mid-1860s, the conflict between the ‘landlords’ and the landless escalated, particularly among the Molotschna Mennonites, prompting the government to intervene in favour of the landless. For the first time, they were granted the right to vote in the congregations. The reserve land was to be divided into half- and quarter-farmhold plots of 30 and 12–15 D respectively.

To purchase land, the colonists had access to the leasehold income from the abandoned district sheep farms and loans from the orphans’ funds. In 1869, the Minister of the Domains approved a proposal by a South Russian colonists’ congress to establish ‘orphan, loan and savings funds’ in every district. The ‘parent colonies’ sought to reduce their financial burden by requiring the settlers to make a contribution of their own and by pledging the land of the ‘daughter colonies’ to the provincial banks, which were usually prepared to grant a loan amounting to two-thirds of the purchase price.

After the Crimean War (1853–1856), many Muslim Tatars and their kinsmen, the Nogais, emigrated to Anatolia, and following the liberation of Bulgaria, Bulgarian colonists moved to their former homeland. Individual German colonists, settler cooperatives and communities were now able to purchase the land of the abandoned auls and villages at low prices.

By 1890, German colonists had founded 339 villages on their own land and 194 hamlets on leased land. In the Yekaterinoslav Governorate, the land holdings of the German colonists had tripled, and in the Kherson and Taurida Governorates they had doubled.^[5] Eighty-nine per cent of German private landowners were former colonists. In 1890, individuals, settlers’ cooperatives and colonies also leased 415,000 D. from landowners. Most of the estates were situated in the vicinity of the parent colonies and in those areas which the Tatars and Nogais had abandoned. In the 1890s, the growth in German land ownership in New Russia slowed as the colonists began to purchase cheaper land in other provinces of the Empire.

From the 1860s onwards, New Russian colonists had been migrating further east, establishing villages in the land of the Don Cossacks, in the Stavropol Governorate and in the Terek region. In the 1890s, the first Mennonite offshoot colonies were also established in the Samara and Orenburg governorates. Mennonites first moved into the Asian part of the empire under the leadership of two chiliastic-minded preachers. After the turn of the century, settlers from the New Russian settlement areas founded villages in the steppe between Omsk and Tomsk.^[6]

Following the abolition of serfdom (1861), the introduction of the zemstvos (local self-governing bodies in the districts and provinces) and judicial reform, it was high time that the status of colonists was brought into line with that of other peasants. Under an Act of 4 June 1871, the Black Sea colonies were placed under general administration. Until then, they had been subject to the supervision of a ‘Welfare Committee for the Colonists of Southern Russia’ (Russian: Popečitel’nyj komitet o kolonistach južnogo kraja Rossii). The government went to such lengths to accommodate the former colonists—who had been renamed ‘settler-owners’ (Russian: poselentsy-sobstvenniki), by grouping their settlements into German municipal districts (volosti) and attaching only small, isolated villages to volosti of other nationalities. Furthermore, it took care to preserve the colonists’ tried-and-tested communal institutions, such as the orphan funds. Since the reform, the German communities had been required to draw up their records and correspondence in Russian. From 1874 onwards, the settler-owners were conscripted into military service. The 1871 Act granted peasants the right to decide, by a two-thirds majority, to transition from communal to individual ownership – until then, the communes’ arable land had been redistributed at regular intervals. As only a few communities made use of this option, the government converted the land tax (obrok) into redemption payments in 1886.

When the Russian government abolished the colonists’ privileges, Canada and the United States of America, as well as Brazil, sought settlers for newly developed provinces. The announcement of universal conscription particularly alarmed the German colonists, especially the Mennonites; around 15,000 Mennonites emigrated to North America, whilst the remainder enlisted for alternative service in forestry units. At the same time, Lutheran Black Sea Germans also left the Russian Empire.

The welfare administration required the clergy and village mayors to ‘exhort the colonists to piety, to attend church on Sundays and public holidays, to pray and to receive Holy Communion’. The spiritual care provided to the German congregations left much to be desired. Most German villages were visited by their pastor only a few times a year; he usually had to look after several villages, often situated far apart. In many Protestant parishes, Pietist communities formed which met for ‘devotional gatherings’. The Catholic colonies were predominantly looked after by Polish and Lithuanian clergy. Inadequate language skills limited their influence within the parish. It was not until 1857 that a seminary was founded in Saratov to train German priests for the colonies.

In Protestant parishes, the schoolmasters also served as sextons. Lessons at the village school were primarily designed to prepare young people for confirmation. When the young people left school, very few could read, write or do arithmetic. Many parents sent their children to school so irregularly that in the 1st Provost District (around Odessa) ‘every child missed 9 of the prescribed six school months, each lasting 15 days’.^[7]

The Mennonites sought to be a community of committed Christians. They were unable to uphold their tradition of shunning the ‘world’ and refusing to take on secular offices within the closed communities of New Russia: Mennonites were elected as village headmen, to whom the authorities granted authority and the power to impose penalties upon their fellow believers.

On the government’s initiative, ‘central schools’ were established from 1834 onwards, intended to train the colonists’ children to become schoolmasters and parish clerks and to promote knowledge of the Russian language. In larger parishes, zemstvo schools were established alongside further central schools, and later grammar schools were also established. The colonists’ interest in educating their children at state-recognised secondary schools increased following the introduction of compulsory military service, as graduates of such institutions were granted a reduction in the length of their military service. The central schools were Russified in the 1880s, and the church schools in the early 1890s. Only German and religion were to be taught in the mother tongue. Following the 1905 Revolution, the government permitted children to be taught all subjects in their mother tongue again during the first two years of school.

The financial support and privileges granted by the tsars to foreign settlers helped them to overcome their initial difficulties. Until 1874, no German family was required to send a son to the army. Under a special privilege, between 1812 and 1840 Mennonite taxpayers paid only a third, and from 1841 to 1869 as little as one-eleventh, of what other farmers were required to pay, enabling them to invest more capital in communal facilities.

Thanks to their agricultural system, the South Russian colonies gained an advantage over the Russian or even Volga German communities. As the land allotment of 60 to 65 D. was not to be divided amongst the heirs, the South Russian colonist was able to utilise his family’s labour, his draught animals, tools and machinery more economically than the Russian peasant, whose share of land was constantly shrinking due to regular redistribution (peredel’) based on the number of souls. This agricultural system accelerated social and occupational differentiation in the German villages of New Russia. All German colonists attended primary school, and some also attended secondary school. In Mennonite villages, the church congregation paid close attention to the moral conduct and, consequently, the work ethic of each individual member. Their status as outsiders in the Russian environment also motivated the colonists to secure their distinct identity in the long term through exceptional economic achievements, the purchase of additional land and the introduction of new techniques and trades, as well as to establish institutions for mutual aid.

The abolition of privileges and the reforms of Alexander II (1855–1881) forced the colonists to break out of the confines of the village. Modernisation – characterised by an increase in trade, the expansion of transport links, urbanisation and social differentiation – strengthened their contacts with the outside world. Just as the process of integration – and, in the cities, assimilation – was in full swing, the nationalist Russian press suddenly denounced the German peasants as alleged outposts of the mighty German Empire and potential traitors to the fatherland. Contrary to Pan-Slavic propaganda, however, the Russian Germans were loyal to the Tsar and took little interest in Bismarck’s empire. Their Russian neighbours regarded the former colonists as an element alien to them in terms of customs and traditions, but harboured hostile feelings towards the German farmers and craftsmen only in exceptional cases.

Following the establishment of the zemstvos in the 1860s, the colonists also took part in the political life of the empire. As a large number of Black Sea Germans owned private land and were therefore eligible to vote in the first two electoral classes, and as the colonists’ voter turnout exceeded that of the rest of the peasantry, they sent a disproportionately large number of representatives to the district zemstvos. Germans were also delegated to the provincial Zemstvos and the Zemstvo administration. In the first elections to the Duma, the all-Russian parliament, the Black Sea Germans predominantly supported the national-liberal ‘Union of 17 October’. With the help of this party, the German deputies were able, in 1910 and 1912, to fend off government attempts to restrict the economic activities of former colonists.

Following the Russian defeat at the Battle of Tannenberg in September 1914, the German soldiers serving in the Russian army were withdrawn from the Western Front and transferred to the Caucasus Front. In the wake of the anti-German sentiment fuelled by the war, the government, in its ‘Liquidation Laws’ of February and December 1915, prohibited all settlers of German descent from purchasing land; on the western border, they were even required to sell their land.^[8]

In the wake of these experiences, the Russian Germans welcomed the February Revolution. As in other cities, they formed representative bodies in Odessa and demanded the repeal of the 1915 Liquidation Laws and a return to German as the official and language of instruction. They also spoke out in favour of the nationalisation of large estates and the allocation of state-owned land to the landless and those with little land. In mid-February 1918, German and Austrian troops marched into Ukraine and were welcomed as liberators by most of the Germans living there. Prompted by Ukrainian nationalisation laws, their representatives submitted plans to the occupying powers for the transformation of their settlement areas around Odessa and in Tauria into German Empire colonies. Should this prove impossible, they requested permission to immigrate to the German Empire. At the same time, an influential minority negotiated with the Ukrainian government regarding national-personal autonomy. Although the German delegation secured, in the peace negotiations with Ukraine and Russia, the right of Germans from both countries to ‘return to their ancestral homeland’ within a ten-year deadline; the Reich government was not, however, interested in a mass return. Rather, the colonists were to act ‘as political and economic factors’ for the German Reich throughout the Russian Empire.^[9] Benjamin Pinkus estimates the number of Russian-German emigrants during the period of the Revolution, the German occupation and the Civil War at 120,000, a large proportion of whom went on to emigrate to North and South America.^[10] Following the withdrawal of the Central Powers’ troops, German and Mennonite ‘self-defence’ units defended the villages against the ‘green’ Makhnovist and common bandit gangs, but were unable to prevent some of their villages from being occupied, plundered and devastated in the spring and autumn of 1919. During the civil war between the ‘Whites’ and the ‘Reds’, the German villages of New Russia frequently changed hands. Compared with the gangs, the colonists found the occupation by both the ‘White’ armies of Denikin and Wrangel and by the Red Army less oppressive, as under their rule they at least no longer had to constantly fear for their lives. It was only after Wrangel’s army had been driven out of the Crimea in November 1920 that the peasants were able to set about rebuilding their destroyed villages.

Part of the Soviet policy on nationalities in the 1920s involved the creation of even the smallest territorial national units, within which official business and school teaching were to be conducted in the inhabitants’ mother tongue. A large proportion of the German villages in Ukraine were organised into 200 national Soviets and seven national raions.^[11] As only a few German settlers were prepared to cooperate with the Communist Party, the Party frequently filled posts in the local and raion soviets with German industrial workers, former German prisoners of war and emigrants, or even officials of other nationalities.

The traditional parish and central schools were replaced by four-year primary schools and seven-year, and later ten-year, secondary schools. In 1926, 82.3 per cent of German pupils in Ukraine received instruction in their mother tongue; three years later, this figure had risen to 92.5 per cent, though only 7.5 per cent and 9.2 per cent respectively in secondary schools. Graduates were subsequently able to attend German-language ‘Technika’, which can best be compared to specialist secondary schools in the fields of education, medicine, agriculture and industry. German departments were also established at various universities. The Soviet-German press and publishing industry, which had been brought into line with the regime, experienced an upswing until 1933. Following Hitler’s ‘seizure of power’, the number of titles published fell sharply.

Following the expulsion of the ‘Whites’, the farmers were forced to hand over almost their entire harvest from 1920. Procurement units took hostages to ensure that the farmers also surrendered any grain they might have hidden. Consequently, the farmers were able to sow very little winter wheat in the autumn, which, combined with the drought of 1921, led to a famine. The colonists resisted units that nevertheless demanded the handover of grain by staging uprisings.^[12] Between 1923 and 1928, 18,300 Mennonites from southern Ukraine and the Crimea were able to emigrate with financial assistance from their North American co-religionists, particularly as the ‘State Political Administration’ (Gosudarstvennoe političeskoe upravlenie)—that is, the State Security Service—had been instructed to encourage the emigration of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ whilst retaining the so-called poor peasants.^[13]

During the ‘New Economic Policy’ from 1921 onwards, the farms of the German peasants began to recover. By establishing cooperatives, they sought to promote their economic interests and their national and religious cohesion. Particularly successful was the Mennonite ‘Association of Citizens of Dutch Origin in Ukraine’, which distributed extensive aid from fellow believers in North America and the Netherlands, established cooperatives, secured the return of some expropriated land, defended exemption from military service, set up institutions for education, culture and welfare, and published newspapers.^[14] After the Lutheran-Catholic parallel association had already been banned in 1923, the Mennonite association was also forced to cease its activities in 1926.

From 1928 onwards, the party intensified its campaign against religion. Clergy were arrested, tried and exiled; churches were closed and religious periodicals banned; baptisms, weddings and church funerals were prohibited. The forced collectivisation that began in 1929 hit the German farmers of the Black Sea region, who were accustomed to private ownership, particularly hard. Some of the expropriated ‘kulaks’, the wealthy farmers, were exiled to remote areas of the Soviet Union. Many of them found neither shelter nor work and froze to death or starved.

The loyalty of the Soviet Germans appeared doubtful when Nazi propaganda vociferously embraced the ‘people’s’ and ‘Germans abroad’ and, during the famine of 1932–33, encouraged the collection of parcels and money for their ‘brothers in need’. Whilst the authorities initially accepted the bank transfer of small sums of money from Germany, from 1934 onwards the acceptance of such bank transfers was prosecuted as ‘Hitler aid’.^[15] Between 1934 and 1938, the wave of arrests and extermination also reached German representatives in the Party and the administration. At between one-fifth and one-third, the proportion of Germans arrested between 1936 and 1938 was far higher than their share of the population. In the autumn of 1938, Russian was introduced as the language of instruction in all schools for national minorities, as these had served as a “hotbed of bourgeois-nationalist, anti-Soviet influence on the children”. The national raions were dissolved at the end of March 1939, and the German-language press in the raions ceased publication shortly afterwards.^[16]

Following the German attack, Germans were conscripted into the Soviet Army and deployed to work on fortifications and to transport livestock and agricultural equipment to the east. Subsequently, orders were issued for the deportation of all men aged between 16 and 60 and, ultimately, of the entire remaining German population. Due to the rapid German advance, only 5–15 per cent of the population from the areas west of the Dnieper were ‘deported’ beyond the Urals, whilst the evacuation from the Halbstadt area covered 41 per cent and from the Grunau area east of the Dnieper as many as 64 per cent of the Germans.

The German and Romanian troops were followed by SS Action Group D, which, as part of its mission to ‘clear occupied territories of Jews, communists and partisan groups’, murdered around 100,000 people by the spring of 1942, including ‘ethnic German’ communists. Its remit also included ‘the protection and care of ethnic German settlements’. After the Einsatzgruppe’s withdrawal, these settlements were placed under the supervision of the SS’s “Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle” (Ethnic German Central Office) and its “Sonderkommando Russia”. However, the occupation authorities did not comply with the wishes of both the German and Ukrainian rural populations to dissolve the kolkhozes. At the end of 1941, the SS authorities began resettling Germans into “ethnic German areas”. However, this “re-settlement effort” lasted only until the German settlement areas were threatened with recapture by the Soviet Army. The German farmers organised convoys, with which around 300,000 people reached the ‘Altreich’, the Reichsgau Wartheland and the General Government, where they were overrun by the Soviet Army. After the end of the war, some 140,000 Soviet Germans – mostly Black Sea Germans – from all the occupation zones in Germany were ‘repatriated’ to the Soviet Union.^[17] Like the deportees of 1941, many of these forcibly repatriated people did not survive life as ‘special settlers’ in the camps. No anti-German measure in any state of Eastern Central Europe during the interwar period can even remotely be compared with the oppression and terror in the Soviet state. Since the National Socialists’ “seizure of power”, the fate of the Russian Germans had been even worse than that of the other nationalities in the Soviet Union: The GPU and its successor organisation combed through the German villages in search of potential ‘fascists’, with the result that numerous German families lost their able-bodied male members. Those who managed to leave Ukraine by 1928 could count themselves lucky. Most of the Black Sea Germans who remained behind, along with their descendants, left their places of exile in Siberia, Kazakhstan and Central Asia and emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany from the late 1970s onwards.

• Detlef Brandes: Adopted by the Tsars. The German Colonists and the Balkan Settlers in New Russia and Bessarabia 1751–1914. Munich 1973 (Publications of the Federal Institute for East German Culture and History 2).
• Detlef Brandes, Margarete Busch, Kristina Pavlović: Bibliography on the History and Culture of the Russian Germans. Vol. 1: From Immigration to 1917. Munich 1994 (Publications of the Federal Institute for East German Culture and History 4).
• Detlef Brandes, Victor Dönninghaus: Bibliography on the History and Culture of the Russian Germans. Vol. 2: From 1917 to 1998. Munich 1999 (Publications of the Federal Institute for East German Culture and History 13).
• Meir Buchsweiler: Ethnic Germans in Ukraine on the Eve and at the Outbreak of the Second World War: A Case of Dual Loyalty? Gerlingen 1984 (Publications of the Institute of History, Tel Aviv University 7).
• Viktor V. Čencov: Tragic Fates: Political Repression against the German Population of Ukraine in the 1920s – 1930s [Tragic Fates: Political Repression against the German Population of Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s]. Moscow 1998.
• Victor Dönninghaus: Minorities in Distress. Soviet Policy towards Germans, Poles and Other Diaspora Nationalities 1917–1938. Munich 2009 (Publications of the Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe 35).
• Dmytro Myeshkov: The Black Sea Germans and Their Worlds 1781–1871. Essen 2008 (Publications on Culture and History in Eastern Europe 30).
• Nemcy Rossii. Ėnciklopedija [The Germans of Russia. Encyclopaedia]. 4 vols. Moscow 1999–2006.
• Dietmar Neutatz: The ‘German Question’ in the Black Sea Region and Volhynia. Politics, Economy, Mentalities and Everyday Life Amidst the Tensions between Nationalism and Modernisation (1856–1914). Stuttgart 1993 (Sources and Studies on the History of Eastern Europe 37).
• Natal’ya V. Ostasheva: At the Turn of the Ages. The Mennonite Community of Ukraine, 1914–1931. [At the Turn of the Era. The Mennonite Community of Ukraine in the Years 1914–1931]. Moscow 1998.
• Gerd Stricker (ed.): Russia. Berlin 1997 (German History in Eastern Europe).
• James Urry: None but Saints. The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia, 1789–1889. Winnipeg 1989. German translation: Nur Heilige. Mennoniten in Russland, 1789–1889. Steinbach, Manitoba 1989.

• Research into the History and Culture of the Russian Germans: Newsletter. Essen. Vol. 1–12 (1993–2002/3).
• A Book on the Homeland of the Germans from Russia. Stuttgart 1954 onwards.
• Mennonite Quarterly Review. Published by The Mennonite Historical Society. Goshen, Ind. 1927 onwards.

[1] Vladimir M. Kabuzan: The German Population in the Russian Empire (1796–1917): Composition, Distribution, Proportion of the Population. In: Ingeborg Fleischhauer, Hugo H. Jedig (eds.): The Germans in the USSR: Past and Present. An international contribution to German–Soviet understanding. Baden-Baden 1990, pp. 63–82, here p. 79.

[2] V.B. Evtuch, B.V. Čyrko: Germans in Ukraine (1920s–1990s). Kyiv 1994, p. 9.

[3] Vsesojuznaja perepis’ naselenija 1939 goda. Osnovnye itogi [1939 All-Union Population Census. Basic Data]. Ed. Ju. A. Poljakova. Moscow 1992, p. 68.

[4] For the Tsarist period, I draw largely on my monograph *Adopted by the Tsars*.

[5] Different figures, but the same trend, in Neutatz: *The ‘German Question’*, p. 261.

[6] Detlef Brandes, Andrej Savin: The Siberian Germans in the Soviet State 1919–1938. Essen 2001, pp. 7–21.

[7] *Odessaer Zeitung*, 9 February 1866.

[8] Detlef Brandes: ‘From the Persecutions during the First World War to the Deportation’. In: Gerd Stricker (ed.): German History in Eastern Europe. Russia, pp. 131–212, here pp. 131ff.

[9] Buchsweiler: ‘Ethnic Germans’, pp. 117–121; Alfred Eisfeld: ‘German Colonies on the Volga 1917–1919 and the German Empire’. Wiesbaden 1985, pp. 78–80.

[10] Benjamin Pinkus, Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The Germans in the Soviet Union: History of a National Minority in the 20th Century. Baden-Baden 1987, p. 156.

[11] Brandes: On Persecution, p. 173.

[12] Čencov: Tragičeskie sud'by [Tragic Fates], pp. 11–14.

[13] Natal’ja V. Ostaševa: On the History of Mennonite Emigration in the 1920s. In: Ukrainsko-nemeckie svjazy v novoe i novejšee vremja [Ukrainian–German Connections in Recent and Contemporary Times]. Dnipropetrovsk 1995, pp. 127–135.

[14] Natal’ja V. Ostaševa: The South Ukrainian Mennonites in Search of a ‘Third’, Cooperative Path, 1921–1926. In: Research on the History and Culture of the Russian Germans 5 (1995), pp. 38–52.

[15] Brandes: On Persecution, pp. 201ff.

[16] Čencov: Tragičeskie sud’by, pp. 68–72, 108–113, 144ff.

[17] Ingeborg Fleischhauer: The Third Reich and the Germans in the Soviet Union. Stuttgart 1983; Arkadij German: Repatriation of Soviet citizens of German nationality. Nature of the implementation and results [The Repatriation of Soviet Citizens of German Nationality. The Nature of the Implementation and Results]. In: Germans in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War and in the First Post-War Decade 1941–1955. [Germans in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War and in the first post-war decade, 1941–1955]. Moscow 2001, pp. 261–274.

Detlef Brandes: The Black Sea Region and the Black Sea Germans. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2012. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/54156.html (as at 1 February 2021).